Acute effects of cigarette smoking on inflammation in healthy intermittent smokers

BACKGROUND: Chronic smoking is the main risk factor for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Knowledge on the response to the initial smoke exposures might enhance the understanding of changes due to chronic smoking, since repetitive acute smoke effects may cumulate and lead to irreversible lung damage. METHODS: We investigated acute effects of smoking on inflammation in 16 healthy intermittent smokers in an open randomised cross-over study. We compared effects of smoking of two cigarettes on inflammatory markers in exhaled air, induced sputum, blood and urine at 0, 1, 3, 6, 12, 24, 48, 96 and 192 hours and outcomes without smoking. All sputum and blood parameters were log transformed and analysed using a linear mixed effect model. RESULTS: Significant findings were: Smoking increased exhaled carbon monoxide between 0 and 1 hour, and induced a greater decrease in blood eosinophils and sputum lymphocytes between 0 and 3 hours compared to non-smoking. Compared to non-smoking, smoking induced a greater interleukin-8 release from stimulated blood cells between 0 and 3 hours, and a greater increase in sputum lymphocytes and neutrophils between 3 and 12 hours. CONCLUSION: We conclude that besides an increase in inflammation, as known from chronic smoking, there is also a suppressive effect of smoking two cigarettes on particular inflammatory parameters

L-Glutamine therapy reduces endothelial adhesion of sickle red blood cells to human umbilical vein endothelial cells

BACKGROUND: We have previously demonstrated that therapy with orally administered L-glutamine improves nicotinamide adenosine dinucleotide (NAD) redox potential of sickle red blood cells (RBC). On further analysis of L-glutamine therapy for sickle cell anemia patients, the effect of L-glutamine on adhesion of sickle RBC to human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVEC) was examined. METHODS: The first part of the experiment was conducted with the blood samples of the 5 adult sickle cell anemia patients who had been on L-glutamine therapy for at least 4 weeks on a dosage of 30 grams per day compared to those of patient control group. In the second part of the experiment 6 patients with sickle cell anemia were studied longitudinally. Five of these patients were treated with oral L-glutamine 30 grams daily and one was observed without treatment as the control. t-test and paired t-test were used for determination of statistical significance in cross-sectional and longitudinal studies respectively. RESULTS: In the first study, the mean adhesion to endothelial cells with the autologous plasma incubated cells were 0.97 ± 0.45 for the treated group and 1.91 ± 0.53 for the nontreated group (p < 0.02). Similarly with lipopolysaccharide (LPS) incubated cells the mean adhesion to endothelial cells were 1.39 ± 0.33 for the treated group and 2.80 ± 0.47 for the untreated group (p < 0.001). With the longitudinal experiment, mean decrease in the adhesion to endothelial cells was 1.13 ± 0.21 (p < 0.001) for the 5 treated patients whereas the control patient had slight increase in the adhesion to endothelial cells. CONCLUSION: In these studies, oral L-glutamine administration consistently resulted in improvement of sickle RBC adhesion to HUVEC. These data suggest positive physiological effects of L-glutamine in sickle cell disease

Not Available

Not AvailableSalinity stress is one of the serious factors, limiting production of major agricultural crops; especially, in sodic soils. A number of approaches are being applied to mitigate the salt-induced adverse effects in agricultural crops through implying different halotolerant microbes. In this aspect, a halotolerant, Exiguobacterium profundum PHM11 was evaluated under eight different salinity regimes; 100, 250, 500, 1000, 1500, 2000, 2500, and 3000 mM to know its inherent salt tolerance limits and salt-induced consequences affecting its natural metabolism. Based on the stoichiometric growth kinetics; 100 and 1500 mM concentrations were selected as optimal and minimal performance limits for PHM11. To know, how salt stress affects the expression profiles of regulatory genes of its key metabolic pathways, and total production of important metabolites; biomass, carotenoids, beta-carotene production, IAA and proline contents, and expression profiles of key genes affecting the protein folding, structural adaptations, transportation across the cell membrane, stress tolerance, carotenoids, IAA and mannitol production in PHM11 were studied under 100 and 1500 mM salinity. E. profundum PHM11 showed maximum and minimum growth, biomass and metabolite production at 100 and 1500 mM salinity respectively. Salt-induced fine-tuning of expression profiles of key genes of stress pathways was determined in halotolerant bacterium PHM11.Not Availabl

Frames and Erasures

Frames have been useful in signal transmission due to the built in redundancy. In recent years, the erasure problem in data transmission has been the focus of considerable research in the case the error estimate is measured by operator (or matrix) norm. Sample results include the characterization of one-erasure optimal Parseval frames, the connection between two-erasure optimal Parseval frames and equiangular frames, and some characterization of optimal dual frames. If iterations are allowed in the reconstruction process of the signal vector, then spectral radius measurement for the error operators is more appropriate than the operator norm measurement. A complete characterization of spectrally one-uniform frames (i.e., one-erasure optimal frames with respect to the spectral radius measurement) in terms of the redundancy distribution of the frame is obtained. The characterization relies on the connection between spectrally optimal frames and the linear connectivity property of the frame. The linear connectivity property is equivalent to the intersection dependence property, and is also closely related to the concept of k-independent set. © Springer India 2014